3656Lord of the Gates of Death

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Mathew Morrell

Feb 14, 2006

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Let's not be mistaken. In himself, Ahriman is not evil. It is only
when he extends himself beyond his natural sphere (the Sephirah
Daath) that he works outside the Tree of Life. Then Ahriman becomes
a terrible force in the Cosmos---a "law breaker" working against the
general cosmic order.

Otherwise he is serving a great purpose. The evolution of the
cosmos hinges upon the transmutative capabilities of growth and
decay, a death process that all flesh is subject to by simply
existing in the world. All things die, and are re-born. We have
the right relationship with the cosmos when we willingly accept the
idea of growth and decay and death's role in eternal human
progression. Without death, human evolution would remain static.

"We can characterize Ahriman by saying: he is the Lord of Death
[Whatever] belongs justifiable to death extends also into the higher
regions of the lawful rule of Ahriman. In what surrounds us as
external nature, Ahriman is the rightfully Lord of Death and should
not be regarded as an evil power but as one whose influence in the
general world order is fully legitimate." [Rudolph
Steiner, "Secrets of the Threshold," p. 20]

Yet, once outside the Tree of Life, Ahriman violently opposes the
death process. His identity makes a strange and terrifying reversal
into a vampire of sort seeking life without death, a life unbound by
the wheel of growth and decay. In short, his objective becomes
immortality. Yet it is a type of immortality that requires serious
questioning, for it undoubtedly leads, not to eternal human
progression, but to eternal damnation.

After investigating this plan for immortality, we find that it's
based on cleverness and deception rather than upon any type of
genuine inner change that leads to an increased perception of
reality. His plan consists merely in changing the outer garment of
reality, not the inner man. The inner man is left empty---a kind of
shell or phantom that is a shadow upon the land, with only his
thinking capacity left in tact. In essence, the inner man becomes a
mental being, robotic in all his actions, deathless yet totally
bound to the earth. He is immortal, but not spiritual. The Iron Man
is a purely material being in which the spirit and soul have been
deadened to the extent that he cannot conceive of there being an
implicate order in the Cosmos, or anything other than what exists in
his physical environment.

This is why the drone or a robot is an accurate symbol for Ahriman's
view of immorality. These symbols don't quit convey the shadowy
nature of the drone's inner life, but they do symbolize the
mechanized state of their thinking capacity and their inability to
live freely outside the confines of abstraction. The world in which
they live is purely Ahrimanic, devoid of any life forms that require
growth and decay; such as animals or plants or insects. Rather it
is a world encased in mineral, like a vast city, filled with
futuristic structures that mirror that abstract nature of the
drone's inner life. The world in which they live is a utopia for
highly advanced intellects capable of perceiving only the mineral
kingdom; a world of hyper-abstraction, totally inhuman, and almost
insect-like in its geometry. The people aren't people at all, but
automized beings spiderlike in their thinking. It is immortality,
but immortality gained through a clever manipulation of thinking,
environment, and genetic engineering.